Evince for Windows

[haggholm]

If you loathe the Adobe Acrobat reader half as much as I do, you might be happy to learn that Evince, the standard PDF reader for the GNOME platform, now has a Windows version (get it here). I have not used this Windows version myself, but expect good things. (This latest version of Evince also added support for the one feature I was missing: Displaying annotations.)

Evince is what made me stop hating PDF documents—it does nothing fancy, but displays PDF (and Postscript) documents cleanly, quickly and efficiently. Searching for text in a document resembles, well, searching for text in a text document rather than asking your computer to reindex all its documents while attempting to compute a cure for all cancers, or whatever Adobe make their reader do to slow it down to the startling degree I have come to expect. (If—if—this sounds like an exaggeration, it’s because (1) the Adobe reader for Linux is even worse than the Windows version, and/or (2) they have improved the Windows version since I last used it, reversing a long-standing tradition of adding more and more features that nobody uses except your CPU.)

More seriously and less sarcastically, Evince was the first application that really struck me with a “less is more” sort of beauty—an object lesson in UI design, if you will. It’s there to do one thing: Let me view PDF and Postscript files. It has almost no buttons, options, switches, or fiddly bits. And yet, in its stark simplicity, it was so vastly superior to the obvious alternative that it made me view PDFs as a good format for portable documents rather than a plague upon the internet.

Comments

Adobe reader for windows

[chutzman.livejournal.com]

Last time I had to use adobe reader (the Montreal public transit map was crashing evince), I found that running the windows version under wine to be considerably faster than the native version.